America found
A.L. Rowse
England and the Discovery of America, 1481-1620 D. B. Quinn (Allen and Unwin £6.50) Professor Quinn has become — after the admirable historian, J. A. Williamson — the leading authority on the early English voyages to America, on this side of the Atlantic. On the other side there is the truly great historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, who has — as Williamson had — the immense advantage of being a sailing man himself, indispensable to understanding the conditions of sailing ships and voyages.
Professor Quinn is a specialist and his approach to history is very much a matter, in Eliot's phrase, of "if and perhaps and but"; if perhaps we knew this, and we do not know that etcetera ... It does not make for readability, and the book is not for the general reader. It is a gathering of papers and lectures on various aspects of the subject, shaped up to make something like a continuous survey of the field. It does that fairly well, though not in convincing proportions — the Roanoke Colonies and Jamestown, which actually settled in America and did something — are far more important then mere projectors projecting or voyages Which failed. With the professor -who is a very thorough editor, rather given to overediting — one sometimes cannot see the wood for the trees.
The dispute as to who first discovered America — as if it mattered all that much — has given rise to more nonsense than any subject probably other than Shakespeare. (Myself, I prefer the wicked book written by the naughty French Marquis, Boni de Castellane, who married the homely Gould heiress for her money, Comment j'ai decouvert l'Amerique.) Admiral Morison puts all this in the right perspective with his grand book, The European Discovery. of America: "It has fallen to my lot, working on this subject, to have read some of the most tiresome historical literature in existence. Young men seeking academic promotion, old men seeking publicity.. . . write worthless articles; and the so-called warned journals are altogether too hospitable to these effusions .. , Peculiar features of early maps, which may have been nothing but a draftsman's whimsy, have inspired pages of.vain conjecture. Dozens of islands, rocks and shoals that do not, and never did, exist are depicted on chart of the Atlantic, even down to the nineteenth century; and some have been avidly seized upon as evidence of pre-Columbian voyages. Williamson well observed, 'Ali this map interpretation' is hopelessly uncertain, and from it one may argue almost anything that comes into one's mind'."
Here are two first-class higtorians speaking, both of them sailing men: they know. I agree with them in detesting conjectural history, almost as much as I detest conjecturing about Shakespeare. Fortunes have been spent in America in trying to authenticate — or rather fabricate — evidence about the Vikings. Professor Quinn is much too sympathetic to fruitless cartographical speculation; but even he tells us with regard to the Vinland Map — which had such a blaze of American-style' promotion and publicity: "a certain question must still hang over the authenticity of the Vinland Map . . . There is still a considerable question mark over these issues . . . The location of this library and the name of its (the Map's) owner have not yet been disclosed . . . scholars investigating the provenance of the documents will not be satisfied until they can test for themselves what may be learned from the former owner ..." etcetera.
It reminds me of the South Sea Bubble, and the projector who proposed that people should subscribe to a company "the purpose of which will be subsequently disclosed." There are always people fools enough to do so. Much of Professor Quinn's first section is taken up with argy-bargy about voyages into the Atlantic from Bristol before Cabot: it does not advance solid knowledge on the subject any further than Williamson got with his Cabot Voyages. Over this the professor is at issue with Admiral Morison and has a sharp word for the great man; we are told that his "merit is that he sees sharply in black-and-white terms, and is therefore uniquely qualified to expound what is already known. He is perhaps too impatient to study the nuances of pre-Cabotian enterprise." Of course, the great man is impatient with nonsense, and well understands the law of diminishing returns; besides, it is better to see clear when you are at sea, rather than through a haze of conjecture, imaginary islands and conjectural maps.
Myself, I prefer Professor Quinn on dry land, really his element; here he has some solid information to give us about Sebastian Cabot, amid the mystification he created about himself. Even here, it is "may be" this or it "may be" that: "did Sebastian take part in any of these new voyages? He may have done, but so far we cannot prove positively that he did ... But it is possible also that ..." On this sort of history my sympathies are wholly with Morison and Williamson. I prefer Professor Quinn when he writes about commonsense economic objectives, "such as deep-sea fishing, and the search for fertile islands on which to grow sugar and vines." Codfish is the reality, the Newfoundland Banks more rewarding objectives than those of projectors.
Edward Hayes was such a projector, "a speculator in futures"; he is known to us for his famous description of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's last voyage. How much more is the professor, able to tell us about him, for all the forest of footnotes? It does not amount to much. What is there of solid information about Anthony Parkhurst that we did not know before? There \ is a whole chapter on 'The English Catholics and America'; but hardly any of them got there, it didn't come off, it remained in the realm of speculation.
In fact, after the early Cabot voyages from Bristol, the English efforts across the Atlantic did not amount to much. The French accomplished more; Professor Quinn allows that Francis I's commitments, much greater than Henry VIII's, "did not prevent him from patronising Verrazzano's important survey of the American coast, or from aiding the four important Cartier and Roberval expeditions into the St. Lawrence valley." While the solid Spanish achievement in central and south America is immeasurably greater — and who would not prefer to read about the Conquest of Mexico or Peru than speculative or marginal investigations in cartography? The fact is that the English did not effectively get going across the Atlantic until the Elizabethan Seamen: that is what makes Froude more interesting reading still. . _ Professor Quinn tells us that "what is set out in narrative and exposition has in almost all cases a 'deservedly limited life; it is right it should pass into oblivion within the space of, at most, a quarter of a century so far as the student is concerned." This is rather silly: naturally people who are not very good at narrative ,history are against it. They are contradicted by their own documents, for Edward Hayes's narrative lives and is read still, and so also with Froude's English Seamen of the. Sixteenth Century. It is the professorial works that have a life-span of a quarter of a century at mast, if in truth they ever come alive.
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